However intriguing his life or rich our memory of him as man, colleague and friend, it is primarily his poetry that commands this tribute. He was not only the finest Nigerian poet of his generation but I believe that as his work becomes better and more widely known in the world he will also be recognized as one of the most remarkable anywhere in our time. In Nigeria and in Africa a growing body of poets too young to have known him are under his spell; twenty years after his death he is the most widely imitated African poet.
His best poetry is more appealing and rewarding with every reading, always starting new ripples of significance. Critics have often charged him with obscurity. “Occasional inaccessibility” would be a more accurate phrase, for even at his most arcane moments there is never a blocking of vision in his poetry as there often is in some of his contemporaries. He always remains as visually clear as fine crystal glass. Barring a few obvious mystifications in his early work which he deleted from later editions, the “obscurity” in his poetry comes from a “straining among the echoes” to deliver his own authentic lines.
There is nothing in Nigerian poetry and little in any poetry I know to surpass the haunting beauty, the mystic resonance and clarity of the final movements of the protagonist’s quest in “Distances.” And the reader who cares to look will see in all its detail the spiritual landscape in which the prodigal, weary of travel, is called at last by the goddess into her cavern. The geometric shapes of his final passageway and the strange phosphorescent inscriptions they bear are all unforgettably portrayed.
Okigbo was killed twenty years ago. But he had taken good care to ensure that he will not die.
Preface to Don’t Let Him Die, eds. Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor, Fourth Dimension Publishing Company, Enugu, 1978.
KOFI AWOONOR is better known for his poetry—a strong, controlled poetry—that manages the miracle of muscular power and delicate
accents of song, much of it inspired by the oral performances of his Ewe homeland in Ghana. He has also written some of the most thoughtful scholarly criticism of African life and letters.
In 1971 he made his novelistic début with This Earth, My Brother …, which he called “an allegorical tale of Africa.”
An allegory is as good a name as one can call this rather unusual and highly personal form. It is in fact a medley of forms—intense and tight sequences of poetic prose alternating with more open stretches of realistic narrative and now and again broken by shots of running commentary, all moving sometimes forward in time, sometimes backward or in circles, and at yet other times completely flung outside our accustomed historical time scale.
And yet we are never left behind but swept along the open highways of this eccentric journey or squeezed through its narrow twists, feeling no fatigue whatever (like the demented hero in his last long trek), yet tasting all the pain of the way to the cumulative disaster of its end which, strangely, was always there, around the corner even from the beginning; it is that death which we are told by the hero is always “hiding behind [a man’s] door.”
The story is an allegory of contemporary Africa:
… a land of laughing people, very hospitable people. That’s what the tourist posters proclaim. They forgot to add that pussy is cheap here, the liquor is indifferent, and the people suffer from a thousand diseases, there are beggars on the tarmac at the airport, and the leaders of government, any government, are amenable to fine financial pressures of undetermined favors.
Lionel was talking about riding the first tank into Johannesburg when the revolution comes. My head erect like that of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus, I walk the noon through Covent Garden in search of the theatre where Niggers Everywhere Arise is playing, I carry my repulsive mask of a nigger’s soul into a pub on Tottenham Court Road with Roger: when I snapped my fingers in remembrance of what I wanted to say, the publican with yellow teeth barked I am not a dog. No sir, you are not a dog. I am. The dog that died.
Swinging, our nation’s pentagon smashes the bludgeoned heads of orphans for a balancing trick of stability.
So despite those laughing people, laughing with all their white teeth, Africa is a place of torment and ugliness. Being Ghanaian, and Ghana being so central to modem Africa, Awoonor can sometimes particularize his Africa into his Ghana—a “revolting malevolence” he calls it, reminding us of that other Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, author of the novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
Awoonor’s allegory teems with people, places, incidents, thoughts, emotions, actions, evasions. It follows (pursues may be more apt) the hero from the very orgasm of his conception through his feverish life. It takes off without warning to any part of the world and makes unscheduled stops where it pleases. Yet despite such wide ranging techniques Awoonor never falls into preciousness or superficialities. What he unfolds before us may be fleeting but it is always sharp and never, one is convinced, unimportant. And it is not a succession of haphazard impressions either, despite the seeming arbitrariness of its sequences. There is a cumulativeness, indeed an organic, albeit bizarre, development towards the ultimate failure. But here is no existential futility; at every stage there is a misty hint of a viable alternative, of a road that is not taken, of a possibility that fails to develop. The central failure is African independence, whose early promise is like the butterfly that the child Amamu caught in the fields of yellow sunflowers wide as the moon, and it flew away again. He searched for it for days and found others that looked like it; but no, it was gone. Or his childhood love to the shadowy cousin who died at twelve of a mysterious pain that chewed her intestines, a love he was to spend his life searching for and not finding—certainly not from his been-to wife, Alice, nor even from his more understanding mistress, though she tried harder.
African independence ought to have succeeded, coming as it did at the end of a subjection to an empire that became more and more patently absurd as its days drew to an end. We see its local representative, the plumed district commissioner, reading His Majesty’s inane speech on Empire Day—a man who had gone native at least as far as his women went, pursuing them in his numerous treks into the bush and leaving his sex-starved wife to carry the white man’s burden in the starchy sterility of their district headquarters. We see the African spokesman replying to the royal address with a short bizarre speech ending suitably with an appeal for that symbol of hygienic progress, the pit latrine:
Our people go to latrine in the bush. This is not good. We are happy to serve our noble and gracious King. God save the King.
Then we see poor Abotsi, minion of Empire, who has fought for King and imperial honour but goes mad on his return home because, presumably, he had neglected to perform a ritual of purification for all the Japs, enemies of Empire, he killed in Burma. When he is sick unto death the colonial hospital will not admit him, the spruce nurse complaining about people who smell like he-goats. The church—handmaiden of Empire—will not bury him either.
Another ex-serviceman, Sule, has also gone mad but is still in top physical form, marching every market day to his theme song of Burmese Days, drilling his five-year-old son in the merciless noonday heat.
So the death of Empire was not to be seriously lamented. Senile and absurd, it no longer had the will to stand by and protect its very own. But at least it had its heyday, its years of honour. Its successor, Independence, did not even wait to grow old before turning betrayer. That fine magical moon-shaft whose image occurs again and again in the book, like some Freudian dream, the moonshaft which cleft the ocean (as Jehovah once parted the Red Sea so that His people might reach their land of freedom), soon degenerates into the obscene picture of a moon in a pee posture pissing into the sea. The cool milk bush (another recurrent image) around which the hero Amamu often walks to calm his exploding brain loses its coolness and catches fire:
Stones, oil lamps, rings, landscape flashes, my milk bush is on fire, my people, it is on fire. The yellow lights of streets paved with human excrement from flying trucks pronounce and witness it.
Thus the disappearance of a beautiful and healing dream is witnessed by a sordid reality that abides.
In one way the whole allegory is a tortured return journey in search of a lost beginning:
… let us return to the magic hour of our birth for which we mourn. Crowds came from every corner of the earth. The feast of oneness is here. They raised a shout to the sky, to the heavens, like the Israelites of old they have arrived on the shores of a promised land, like the Anlo sojourners they have come to a place of sunshine, of water, of fish and of good things of earth abundantly given, they must roll their mats and go no more. They have come home. Home is desolation, home is my anguish, home is my drink of hyssop and tears. Where is home?
Betrayal is central to the argument: betrayal of trust, of responsibility. It fouls all levels of a society that should have been dedicated to the restoration of its integrity. We see betrayal at the very top, by the very man who came to save; in the middle ranges by all those ridiculous professionals wasting their substance in drink and womanizing. At the lower reaches we see characters like Mr. Attipoe, the fat drunken road-overseer who orders the gates of Deme shut at the slightest hint of rain so that beleaguered lorry drivers would seek him out with bribes of his favourite illicit gin. Or Kodzo, the town crier, who drinks through seven wakes in two nights and forgets what message he should announce, although he has already taken his fee, his drink money of one shilling. He finally does remember after much effort of will; it is to tell Deme that the drunken overseer’s sister has given birth to a child—a triviality that shows how traditional institutions and usages have been debased and travestied. But how could it be otherwise when traditional elders themselves, who should guard the customs, are in the front line of desecrators? Kodzo remembers them as
… those stupid-looking old men, intensely looking at him, their gullets racing up and down in anticipation of the drin
k they would get from him. Especially Topa, his head like a Kuli water pot and eyes flaming like a parrot’s tail feather. Never did an honest day’s work. All he knew was to sit in judgment on others and get a drink out of them.
Through this teeming allegory we catch glimpses of the hero Amamu at significant moments in his life. The phrase “catch glimpses” is in fact misleading, since we know that even in those sequences that are most remote from him personally—for example, in the invocation of the poet killed in battle, Okigbo, or the assassinated freedom fighter, Eduardo Mondlane—it is Amamu who is stretched on the rack and also Africa whose story his life parallels in its purposelessness and self-destructiveness.
The question that one must ask at the end of Awoonor’s book is: What then? He hasn’t given any answer, and doesn’t have to. But of late, many writers have been asking such questions: What then? What does Africa do? A return journey womb-wards to a rendezvous with golden-age innocence is clearly inadequate. Amamu’s father may have acted insensitively, but on balance he was right to show impatience at all the lachrymose farewells before the boy’s first departure from his mother’s hut to the greater world beyond. Shoving aside the wailing women, he had brusquely and with a curse hoisted the boy into the lorry waiting to take him on a dusty journey to the coast and the future. The future is unavoidable. It has to be met. What is not inevitable is malingering purposelessness. Of that, even Ghanaians must now be prepared to acquit Nkrumah.